Refrigeration who invented it

Carbon dioxide was introduced as a refrigerant in the same year. Moore's device would now be called an "ice box" -- a cedar tub, insulated with rabbit fur, filled with ice, surrounding a sheetmetal container for transporting butter from rural Maryland to Washington, DC. The Refrigeration Research Museum - Who invented the refrigerator? When was it invented? Ice Cube Trays The history of ice cube trays.

FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now! Important disclaimer information about this About site. Depression Self-Test Vitamins for Depression? Chinese harvested ice from rivers and lakes as early as 1.

They even had religious ceremonies for filling and emptying ice cellars. Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans placed large amounts of snow into storage pits and covered it insulating material like grass, chaff, or branches of trees.

They used these pits as well as snow to cool beverages. Egyptians and ancient people of India would moisten the outside of the jars and the resulting evaporation would cool the water that was inside of the jars. The first group of people to use cold storage to preserve food was Persians.

They invented Yakhchal, a type of an ice pit. Ice harvesting was for centuries the only method of food refrigeration. In 18th century England, servants collected ice in the winter and were putting it into icehouses. Icehouses were places where the sheets of ice were packed in salt, wrapped in flannel, and stored underground to keep them frozen until summer.

In the 19th century, the first ice boxes started appearing in England. The refrigerant then moves through an expansion valve , where the pressure drops and it turns back into a gas. As it changes from liquid to gas, its temperature falls, cooling the air. Fans and motors circulate this cooled air within an insulated area.

The first refrigerators used liquid refrigerants like ether, but in , Carl von Linden discovered an improved method of liquefying gas. This made the mass production of refrigeration devices practical, paving the way for their widespread sale and use in the 20th century.

There were still severe problems with the design, however. Early refrigeration units used highly toxic gases such as ammonia , sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride. The chambers containing these gases sometimes leaked, resulting in several fatal home accidents in the early s.

Appliance manufacturers realized that a safer cooling element was needed, which led to the discovery of synthetic refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons CFCs. In various places in Europe during the 17th century, saltpeter dissolved in water was found to create cooling conditions and was used to create ice. In the 18th century, Europeans collected ice in the winter, salted it, wrapped it in flannel, and stored it underground where it kept for months. When ice wasn't available or practical, people used cool cellars or placed goods underwater, according to History magazine.

Others built their own ice boxes, according to Keep It Cool. Wooden boxes were lined with tin or zinc and an insulating material such as cork, sawdust, or seaweed and filled with snow or ice. The concept of mechanical refrigeration began when William Cullen, a Scottish doctor, observed that evaporation had a cooling effect in the s. He demonstrated his ideas in by evaporating ethyl ether in a vacuum, according to Peak Mechanical Partnership , a plumbing and heating company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Oliver Evans, an American inventor, designed but did not build a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid in In , English scientist Michael Faraday used liquefied ammonia to cause cooling. Jacob Perkins, who worked with Evans, received a patent for a vapor-compression cycle using liquid ammonia in , according to History of Refrigeration. For that, he is sometimes called the "father of the refrigerator. John Gorrie, an America doctor, also built a machine similar to Evans' design in Gorrie used his refrigerator, which created ice, to cool down patients with yellow fever in a Florida hospital.